The adventure starts here

MINI DOCUMENTARY

There was no preparation in the pre-production stage. Firstly we went to the Swanston Library and decided the best location for the Vox-pop. Each of the group members shared their personal ideas. We inspected the place and took location stills before the shoot. We decided to shoot on the main entrance of the Library. The Library entrance had enough light for the scene, so we stick on to one plan only. We also decided on the cast and crew roles for the next day, and I took the role of cinematographer.

PRODUCTION:

I was in charge of the camera and lighting in the production. My first task was to set up the camera settings, the frame rate was set in 24 fps and 1/100 shutter. The location had enough light, so the high exposure value and high shutter became the reason for less noise and excellent quality of the footage. The white balance or Kelvin value was 3900K.

We had made full preparation for the shooting, but production process started with a problem; we couldn’t start the shoot as expected because of some unknown security issues. My role was to handle the camera and also director gave me the full privilege to direct the shot. I need to tell the interviewee where to stand and where to move when doing the take. With the limited time, another issue was with setting the white balance. Setting white balance for each shot made out work slow. Later after going through the footages and audios, everyone in the was pleased with the quality and lighting of the raw files. After the shoot, I went and took overlay filler videos of the Library.

For the sound recording, we planned to position the boom mic as close as possible to the interviewee. We recorded ambience sound. There was no recording process.

POST-PRODUCTION:

Naming the raw footages and sound clip was the first step, and it was followed by setting up the project, sequence and bin in Premier Pro. The dialogues matched the lip sync of the interviewee perfectly. With the clapping sound of hand, the merging of audio and video was easy. Editing was the most straightforward task for me, I have experience working in Adobe Premier for feature films and ad films.

Two separate sequences were created to edit both client and my version of edit. Editing client version was easy because it had very few cuts and merge, and the captions were on the black screen. But Editing ‘My Movie’ version was interesting, as I had a perfect plan for the edit, like how the captions should appear and go. Caption and outline were designed in the Adobe Photoshop and synced to Premier. Sorting same questions and answers from footages were the difficult problem I faced during the edit.

Overlay filler footages were added before the start of the interview in the video. The raw footage had little bit shake, so ‘Wrap stabiliser’ effect was used to make it stabilise. Tracking in all the footages were in different speed, so time remapping was used to make it similar. Ambience sound was added in a new track. ‘Constant Power’ audio transition effect was used to sync adjacent audio clips.

Bin Screenshot:

Timeline Screenshot:

Workspace Screenshot:

Audio of the raw files was filled with noise and dialogues of the crew members. After arranging the clips and audio, each clip was exported to Adobe Audion to denoise and match the adjacent clips. After importing back the “Constant power” audio transition was used to match the audio with other audio clips.

I’m a great fan of Blue tone in movies. So, I decided to give a bluish tone to the whole film. The Three Way colour corrector and RBG curves were used for accomplishing the task. Reducing the saturations helped me to reduce the yellow and blue tone in the raw footage. I tried three different versions of grading. So to make the work easier, three adjustment layers were added in the timeline, and grading was done on the layers alone and placed the layer over the track were footage are sorted.

At the end of the video, a ‘Dip to Black’ effect was added to make a smooth ending to the video. With the help of ‘Pen Tool’, a fade was added to the audio at the end. End credits were added with the interviewee’s names.